‘Surrogates’ raises some interesting questions

Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of getting up and getting ready to face the world every day, we were able to send robots in our place, wired to our brains so that we could still be said to be “working?” There’s a certain appeal to the prospect. But if you really start to think about the world that “Surrogates” proposes, you can see that that world can become more dangerous than the real one.

In the not too distant future, real people stay at home in specialized easy chairs in near total isolation, sending their robot surrogates out to work in the world. The crime and murder rates drop to an almost unprecedented low, as its owner does not feel damage done to a surrogate. Everyone’s surrogate is sculpted to beautiful, flawless perfection.

Bruce Willis is FBI agent Tom Greer, who with his partner Agent Jennifer Peters (Radha Mitchell) is investigating what at first appears to be a simple vandalism case against a pair of surrogates outside a Boston nightclub. But the case takes on frightening dimensions when it is discovered that the destruction of the surrogates also cause the death of their human operators. One of the dead humans is the son of the inventor (James Cromwell) of surrogate technology. A great deal of the population is now at risk, as nearly everyone uses surrogates.

Greer uses his “surrie” to track the weapon to a “meatsack” (real human), Miles Strickland (Jack Noseworthy) that flees into a humans-only sanctuary run by The Prophet (a dreadlocked Ving Rhames). But the accidental entry of his surrie into the restricted area inflames the non-surrogate humans that live there, and they destroy his surrogate. Greer now has to enter the real world himself, unprotected by the comfortable world of the surrogate, in order to solve the case.

DVD extras:

• Commentary by director Jonathan Mostow (“Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines”).

• Music video: “I Will Not Bow” by Breaking Benjamin

BD extra additions:

• A More Perfect You – The Science of “Surrogates” featurette: Explores the use of robotic technology and how it is rapidly progressing towards the full-body replacement suggested in the film. Interviews the cast and crew of the film, along with inventors of body part replacement technology.

• Breaking the Frame – A Graphic Novel Comes to Life featurette: Interviews with the original graphic novel’s creators, Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, along with other cast and crew members.

• Four deleted scenes

The critics weren’t too kind to “Surrogates,” giving it only a 40% on the Tomatometer. But I like movies that make me think, and this one gave me plenty to think about.

There are obvious comparisons to other films here. The surrogates can be seen as avatars, just like the blue-skinned N’avi avatar in the recent James Cameron film. They are also robots, like those seen in “I, Robot.” However, they do not rely on positronic brains, as they are controlled directly by their human owners. The film also felt like it had some Philip K. Dick influences, such as those introduced in the films “Blade Runner” and “Minority Report.”

One beautiful female surrogate turned out to actually be a middle-aged overweight guy; a sly poke at the anonymous world of social interaction web sites, where that “sexygirrl” moniker is actually some web nerd playing the part of someone he’s not. But it also brought to mind the line from 1995′s “Strange Days,” a film where the main form of pleasure was “jacking in” the brain directly to a machine that would let the user experience whatever the original recorder experienced. Ralph Fiennes, the salesman for the machine, asked his client who is watching a couple across the room, “How’d you like to be him? How’d you like to have a hot girlfriend like that? How’d you like to be her?”

The film’s subplot has Greer living just down the hall from his wife (Rosamund Pike), who prefers to send her surrogate out for all social interactions, even with her husband. The social implications of this echo the current fascination that some people have for social-networking sites and online chat rooms. They hide behind the masks and online personas they have created. The sculpted faces and bodies of the surrogates are the obsession taken to physical form.

The surrogates’ creator, Dr. Lionel Canter (Cromwell) initially created them for disabled people, beginning with himself. But the corporation that he helped found forced him out because they wished to market the device to a wider market, including the military. This is a slap at the military-industrial complex, which is increasingly turning to robots to perform missions. In fact, the Army general Greer interviews is conducting a battle using surrogates, which he euphemistically refers to as a “peace action.”

There are some decent action sequences in “Surrogates,” but it’s not “High-octane action” as the drop quote says on the cover. In fact, I felt there were more dramatic sequences than action. I do think the cliché of the dead son was probably unnecessary.

However, “Surrogates” is an acceptable science-fiction police procedural thriller. I don’t know that it’s worth buying the BD, but the film is worth a rental, at least. Perhaps it will make you think about the novel directions that technology is going as well.